Are more guns the solution?

President Barack Obama’s proposals to reduce gun violence in our society offer a measured and reasonable approach to preventing the all too frequent mass murders of children and others in our community.

Over the last 30 years, for example, we have witnessed mass shootings in schools, workplaces, restaurants, shopping malls and in government and religious buildings.

Of course, the usual suspects are pledging to fight hard to keep the president’s proposals from becoming law.

Texas Republican Congressman Steve Stockman said he is prepared to start impeachment proceedings against the president, if that is what it takes to shoot down Mr. Obama’s executive orders around gun control.

But it is ridiculous that at a time when states like Massachusetts require school districts to conduct fingerprint-supported national criminal background checks on all teachers and school employees, some would take issue with the president asking for criminal background checks for all gun sales.

It would seem that as far as the gun industry, the National Rifle Association and general gun culture of this country goes, ignorance is bliss.

Reinstating and strengthening the assault weapons ban, restoring the 10-round limit on ammunition magazines and protecting police officers by getting rid of armor-piercing bullets, as the president is proposing, sounds like a no-brainer in an era in which 6- to 10-year-old children are being gunned down by depraved gunmen wielding assault weapons.

We have been told that the shooters involved in several of the recent mass murder rampages, including at Virginia Tech, Tucson, Aurora, Oak Creek and Newtown, used magazines holding more than 10 rounds. The gunman in the Newtown shooting had multiple 30-bullet magazines.

These magazines would have been illegal, if the assault weapons ban was not allowed to expire in 2004.

The NRA and its supporters have been very successful at painting any gun control measures as an attack against the Second Amendment, and to place the blame for gun violence elsewhere.

Who can forget the response of Wayne LaPierre, the executive director of the NRA, to the Newtown tragedy?

He blamed the media, the mentally ill, the criminal class, violent video games and Hollywood as the sources of the problem, and then called on Americans to pack more guns as the solution.

Interestingly enough, in a recent “Face the Nation” interview, David Keene, president of the NRA, said he was all for keeping “weapons out of the hands of those who are likely to commit such crimes.”

But who might these likely perpetrators be?

Mr. Keene was perhaps thinking of gangbangers and such, but according to a Mother Jones article, “A Guide to Mass Shootings in America,” of the approximately 62 mass murders across the country since 1982, 44 of the killers have been white men, with an average age of 35, although the youngest was 11 years old.

That’s right. Seventy percent of the mass murders in this country since 1982 have been committed by white men and boys.

Now it would be silly to use this statistic to keep guns out of the hands of this group, which perhaps represents the highest percentage of gun owners in the country, but shouldn’t somebody be asking why this is so?

But as I have said already, for the NRA and its allies, ignorance is considered bliss, which is why some people might have a problem with the president issuing an executive order to end the freeze on gun violence research.

But shouldn’t we be asking why there was such a freeze in the first place?

Such a question would lead us to this: In 1996 the NRA, with their congressional allies, de-funded research into gun violence by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The CDC had asked questions such as whether people with guns in their homes were being protected by those weapons, and the answers they were getting were that homes with guns had nearly triple the risk of homicide and five times the risk of suicide than those without.

It is understandable why the NRA would want to squash such research, but it is baffling why democratically elected politicians would go along with the idea.

As President Obama pointed out in signing his executive order on ending the ban on gun violence research, “We don’t benefit from ignorance.

“We don’t benefit from not knowing the science from this epidemic of violence.”